Leviathan's Blood (51 page)

‘Is that why you are here?’ She placed the glasses on the table, careful not to put too much weight on it, or to break them with her hard fingers. ‘You pour, please.’

Caeli broke the seal with a single twist. ‘Yeah.’ She began to pour. ‘The Traders’ Union and Lady Wagan are meeting tomorrow night. Thought I’d see if you wanted to
come along?’

She took the glass. ‘I’ll pass.’

‘You going to stay in your dead friend’s house?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s a little morbid.’

‘I’m tired, Caeli.’

‘Aren’t we all.’ She lifted the glass in salute, then drank. ‘I have spent the last week sleeping on the ground and living in ugly rooms. I rode out of Yeflam the night
of the storm because Lady Wagan wanted me to deliver new orders to Kal Essa’s Brotherhood. Without the captain here, the guard is Lieutenant Mills’s command, but the other work is mine.
I don’t mind, but the shoes are hard to fill. And when I returned, I found out that Wila had been cut off from the city. The guard had been increased and no one has been allowed down the
ramp. Food and water is delivered by the soldiers, but no one will tell anyone how much or how little is being taken. Lian Alahn has told Lady Wagan that he can do nothing. He claims everything in
Yeflam has ground to a halt politically, that everything has been militarized. From one end to the other, it certainly looks that way. A lot of Lady Wagan’s people in Yeflam have been leaving
while they can. I have walked into over a dozen empty shops, at the least.’

‘You don’t need me.’ Ayae placed her empty glass back on the table. ‘You should contact Xrie.’

‘But I’m here instead.’

‘Why?’

‘Maybe I think sitting around in your dead friend’s house is morbid and I’m worried about you.’ Caeli began to refill the glasses. ‘Did you know the captain is in
Faaisha? Lady Wagan lied when she said he had been let go. A letter came from Lord Tuael. It had the symbol of Refuge on it.’

‘Refuge?’

‘Refuge is—’ She hesitated. ‘Refuge is what desperate people reach for. There isn’t much of it left, a few soldiers here and there. It is mostly a myth
now.’

‘I know what it is.’ She took the full glass from the blonde woman. ‘The camps on the edge of Sooia were established by Refuge. I don’t remember much of the story –
I was only little when it was told – but I remember that the camps used to belong to mercenaries. That was a long time ago, though. A hundred years, I’d say.’

‘It has been around for a long time, and there’ve been a lot of captains, and a lot of soldiers in it.’ The guard slumped back in the chair, holding her own glass. ‘Lady
Wagan says that it might not come back. That it might not ever exist again. But she wants the Mireeans off Wila before this war begins. She wants them on the farms and on the land. She wants to be
ready to support Heast when he begins to take the fight to Waalstan.’

‘But he doesn’t have an army. Surely she sees that?’

‘I don’t know what she sees.’ Caeli let out a low breath. ‘But I know what I see. I see Wila in my dreams. I can smell shit and salt and blood and I see the tents. They
appear tighter, but they are empty, and there is a roar in the background, like the crash of surf. Except, when I turn to it, it looks like a huge mouth, and everything is being drawn into it to be
consumed.’

Ayae looked down at the glass in her hands. The last time she had sat and drunk laq it had been with Lady Wagan and she had asked her for help. She had asked her to hold a bird until they
reached Yeflam, but Ayae had not done so. Instead, she had walked into the Keep to attack Fo and Bau beside Mireean Guards and Steel soldiers. And Queila Meina. ‘You want me to help
you,’ she began, ‘but I lost control on Xeq.’

‘I know.’ Caeli lifted her glass and the light from the kitchen caught in it, and in the laq it wavered and bent so that nothing was straight. ‘Maybe Faise holds it against
you. Maybe Zineer. I know you hold it against yourself. But I’d still like my friend to stand beside me while the world of Muriel Wagan and Aned Heast devours me.’

Eidan had taken to prowling the edges of the enclosed land of the estate. Zaifyr did not know why his brother found it so difficult to remain in the building – even the
storm had been unable to keep him indoors for longer than an hour – but he knew that outside he searched for Anguish.

The creature had not been seen since the night of the trial. When he and Jae’le had suggested to Eidan that Anguish had been forcibly drawn back to the child, he had rejected their words.
‘If she has forced him to open his eyes,’ he said in his deep voice, ‘he will remain isolated. If she is using him to watch us, then he will stay away, no matter what pain he will
suffer.’ He stood outside the door of the house, his gaze on the gate at the end of the path. There were no longer any guards made from wind, only a simple gate, but to judge by his
brother’s stare, a dangerous wilderness existed beyond the steel, one that was without mercy.

What had befallen Eidan in the company of the child would emerge eventually, Zaifyr knew. It need not be demanded, or pushed for; secrets that another held would emerge, given enough time,
though they might be too late, or too damaging, when they did. The thought was one that he had as he stepped from the back room of the mansion. He had sensed Aelyn’s arrival and, as he walked
into the main room that led to the front door, he saw the shadows of her and Eidan pause outside the door.

‘You do not need to stay here.’ It was Aelyn’s voice he heard first. ‘There is still a room for you in the Enclave.’

‘I am not welcome there,’ Eidan said. ‘Only you are.’

‘This is your home.’

‘I wonder,’ Eidan said quietly. ‘Do I have a choice where I sleep?’

‘You always have a choice,’ Aelyn replied. ‘
We
have always had a choice.’

‘Unless we have not.’ A third voice, an inhuman voice, appeared as a shadow fluttered into view of the window, a storm petrel settling onto the sill. ‘As you said yourself,
sister, questions will need to be asked.’

‘I do not need to ask questions about free will and fate,’ she said, a weariness etching itself on her voice. ‘I know that it is my own choice.’

‘I do not disagree,’ Jae’le said. ‘But I wonder. When I first entered Yeflam I would listen to the child’s priests. They would speak to audiences that did not
listen. They would tell them about the future. About how it is not complete. How it changes not with our actions, but with hers.’

The closeness that Zaifyr had not wanted to break between Eidan and Aelyn strained under Jae’le’s words. He was the eldest brother, and though his lack of power had been revealed,
his authority still remained. In the Enclave, he had led a single, determined argument for attacking the child immediately, and at some points during the night, his sheer force of will almost
convinced those in the room to agree. Had not the child’s words remained like a wound on Jae’le, Zaifyr believed that he would have succeeded; but the words did linger, and when they
returned to the house in the early moments of the storm, he had asked his brother about the tower, and about his power. The other had said he had no desire to reclaim it, but Zaifyr suspected that
the truth ran deeper, that perhaps he could not reclaim it. He believed, by the violence in his brother’s gaze, that Jae’le would already have done so to kill the child if he could.

‘The priests claim that she is making a single truth,’ he continued. ‘That her actions are creating a world of purity.’

‘They speak of it all the time around her,’ Eidan said as Zaifyr sat himself on the bottom step. ‘She tells them that she will consume the gods like grain to reach that
point.’

‘Lor Jix’s words would suggest the gods themselves feared exactly that,’ Jae’le’s inhuman voice said. ‘If we are to believe the dead, then we are all their
creations to be used against her.’

A sigh escaped Eidan. ‘I hope you are correct in that, at least,’ he said. ‘On the Plateau, I was the witness of an awful event. There were those who were victims, and those
who went willingly, and both screamed in such ways that I had never before heard as she drew the spirits of killers from the Plateau. I have thought much about that day, for it was a great wrong,
and yet I did nothing to stop it. Worse, I took part in it. I have puzzled over why it has troubled me – I have killed men and women in a carnival of ways and seen such sights that to call
them horrific is but a starting point. But as I stood on the Plateau, I felt as if I was staring at myself from a distance, and I could see all that I could become, and all that I might do as a
divine being, and I was deeply troubled by it. To such an extent that I have wondered if it was not truly my thought, but one given to me, one put aside by a god for this moment.’

‘Would that greatly relieve you, if it was true?’ Jae’le asked.

‘I think it would still trouble me,’ he said.

Through the window, Zaifyr watched as Aelyn’s shadow mingled with Eidan’s. She became lost in it, and it was only with the most careful of inspections that he could see her hands and
her hair. But now, as the silence between the three grew, the shadow of her body began to detach itself, and in a quiet voice, she said, ‘Tell Qian that the announcement will be in two days.
We will march for war then.’

Shortly afterwards, she was gone.

Beneath Bueralan and Taela’s feet, the first of the morning’s butterflies died in sharp cracks.

They had left the graves together, after a long moment of silence, after Bueralan had rolled his shoulders and, in changing the topic, said that he had stables to clean. He had continued to care
for the horses alone during the week and would come to the stables in the early hours of the morning, before the butterflies were thick, and return in the afternoon, after they had died. He
refilled the troughs from the well out back, raked out the stalls, fed the horses, and then brushed them. He did it alone, but he felt no intrusion when Taela fell in beside him, and indeed, felt
her help would be useful. He had not taken the horses out of the stalls yet. As if they knew the figure that stood in the house up the hill, they showed no desire to leave the safety of the
stables, but Bueralan knew that they would have to be taken out to exercise soon, and a second person would make that easier.

‘When I was young, my mother had a huge stable built,’ he said, lifting a rake from the stand. ‘She made the walls from stone and the roof from slate, but the stalls inside
were divided by wood. She had a very specific request that it be big enough for them to move around in, and wanted it to open into a huge yard. She would go out each day around midday, when the sky
was starting to clear, and let the horses out into that yard.’

‘Yoala was not as kind to her animals.’ Zi Taela leant against the stable door and watched him intently. ‘Do you plan to clean all the stalls?’

‘There’s another rake.’

She laughed.

‘You dig graves, but don’t clean stalls?’

Her laughter turned into a swear word, but she reached for the rake. ‘This really is the kind of thing you pay others to do, Bueralan.’

‘I’ve been paid to do a lot of things.’ He stopped outside the stable of the tall grey. The horse had appeared in the grounds after the night of the party, but it had been Aela
Ren who led the beast to the stables. After Bueralan had found him, he had asked the Innocent about it, and he had simply replied that it appeared that it had a bond with him. ‘But mostly, a
horse is worth more than you. Ask any mercenary who has had to pay for one lost in battle.’

‘It’s because your horse followed you here that you think this is fine, isn’t it?’ Taela stood in front of the horse, her hand scratching its neck. ‘You should give
him a name.’

‘Horse is fine,’ he said sourly. ‘Also, I hope he bites you.’

The horse did not, of course, and neither did any of the other fifteen in the stable.

Bueralan enjoyed Taela’s company and for a while he forgot about the man who stood in the house in the distance, and he forgot about the coldness that pressed against his chest . . . and
he might have continued to forget all that troubled him, might have forgotten who he was, if not for the fact that, after raking out the straw in the stalls, he had climbed the wooden ladder to the
stable’s upper level and begun to push down the replacement, only to hit a body that promptly screamed.

Hau Dvir, a Prince of the Saan, stared up at Bueralan, pleading desperately with him not to kill him.

‘Calm down –
hey, kid!
’ The saboteur’s voice cracked out. ‘You’re fine.’

‘He’s still—’

‘But he isn’t
here
.’ The boy was filthy. It was clear that he had not been living in the stable for the entire week; probably, to judge by the mud around his trousers,
the split in his boots and the cuts across his face from branches, he had spent no more than the one night beneath the loose hay. ‘Not right here, so keep your voice down.’

Taela appeared behind him, her rake held loosely like a staff, ready to strike. ‘He can’t stay here,’ she said quietly. ‘Ren will know.’

Bueralan agreed. ‘Why are you here?’ he asked Hau.

‘I-I had nowhere to go,’ he whispered quickly, tears welling up in his eyes. ‘I’ve never been to Ooila before! Usa took care of everything! I don’t know where to
go!’

‘You just ride, that’s all.’

‘Just—’

‘The destination doesn’t matter.’ The saboteur looked at Taela. ‘You have any money?’

‘Only my jewellery, but that’s back in the mansion.’

Bueralan had nothing on him, either. He held out his hand to the Saan Prince, but the boy shook his head and scrambled to his feet on his own. ‘Take one of the horses here,’ the
saboteur said. ‘Not the grey. The grey is mine.’

‘He tried to bite me!’

‘That’s why he’s mine,’ he continued, not allowing the boy’s hysteria to grow. ‘You saddle it and you ride. You ride through everything out there until you
hit a port or a town, and you sell the horse, and you buy your way back to the Saan.’

Hau Dvir stared wide eyed at him.